1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a power consumption control method applied to a communication system and related devices, and more particularly, to a method and a device making use of communications between two network devices to adjust transmitting capabilities of these two network devices in order to save power and making use of a fallback mechanism to avoid errors.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a high speed communication system, such as a 1Gbase-T/10Gbase-T Ethernet system, the power consumption of the communication system increases correspondingly as its circuits operate frequently. Furthermore, the power consumption of the communication system increases correspondingly as the number of its transport ports increases. Hence, how to save the power consumption of the communication system becomes an important topic in this field.
Presently, the most common power-saving method is to adjust its own parameters of a network device (e.g. a first network device) in the communication system. For example, the transmitting capability of its transmitter or the receiving capability of its receiver can be lowered so as to save power. Since it is unable to make sure whether the other side (e.g. a second network device) can still link normally after lowering the transmitting capability or the receiving capability of the first network device, a margin is usually reserved in order to avoid errors. However, the reserved margin will result in waste of power consumption, which cannot achieve the optimum power-saving performance.